Tuesday, 20 January 2009

2nd Day of SiswaSat 2008 - The Launch Day

Today event started very early morning. Each team had to set up their own ground station.

One of the most important part of the SiswaSat competition is whether the CanSat follows the strict rules of dimension and weight. All components must fit inside the standard 325ml soda can and the mass of the satellite must not exceed 350g. The tolerance of the digital scale used by ANGKASA was plus-minus 7g, so the most a CanSat can weight was 357g.

The judges were monitoring the ground station during the launch and the MMUSat ground station team had to answer any inquiries from the judges. The judges had to make sure MMUSat did transmitting accelerometers data and altitude reading from the sensor on board to the ground station during descent time.

The large yellow helium balloon was the launch vehicle for SiswaSat. The balloon seems to be smaller than the balloon in SiswaSat 2007. Due to strong wind and a smaller launch field, the altitude was set to be lower than expected, even lower than the altitude achieved in SiswaSat 2007.

After the launch, the MMUSat launch field team brought back the CanSat for the inspection of the judges. This was to ensure MMUSat can withstand the impact of the landing and still functioning.

There was even an interview from local TV Station and MMUSat team leader was one of the participant being interviewed.

The Post Flight Review presentation was in the afternoon, a few hours after the launch. It seems that not many team had a truly successful launch, the launch compartment was too small and there was just too many things that can go wrong.